In the last decade or so, computer telephony integration (CTI) has come to be employed with switching systems. A CTI terminal is a combination of a personal computer (PC) with an attached telephone. The PC is controlled by an application program. This application program emulates a voice terminal used in call centers such as a Callmaster or Callmaster II voice terminals. In addition to emulating a normal call center voice terminal, the PC application allows additional functions to be performed. The PC is interconnected to the switching system utilizing normal telephone communication links. The switching system is programmed to consider the CTI terminal as an ordinary call center voice terminal. This means that the switching system is administered to provide telecommunication features based on feature access codes, telecommunication functions based on terminal button assignments and system parameters as well as display formats which would be displayed on the display of a voice terminal. In the prior art, this information must be administered on the PC controlling these CTI terminal manually by going from PC to PC. This procedure is particularly error prone since the information must first be retrieved for each of the CTI terminals from the switching system and then manually transferred to the CTI terminals. Clearly, there exists a need in the art to provide a mechanism for the automatic transfer of this system administration data from the switching system to the PCs within the CTI terminals.
Computer telephony integration has been especially used in call centers. Call centers are systems that enable a group of agents to serve incoming and/or outgoing calls, with the calls being distributed and connected to whichever of the agents happen to be available at the time of the call. The call-distribution function commonly referred to as automatic call distribution (ACD) is generally implemented in software that executes either in a stored program controlled switching system, such as a private branch exchange (PBX), that effects the call connection between agent telephones and external telephone lines, or in an adjunct processor of the switching system.